[fpc-devel] Question about memory alignment (again!)

[J. Gareth Moreton]

Hi everyone,

Recently I've made some optimisations centred around the SHR instruction 
on x86, and there was one pair of instructions that caught my attention:

movl (%rbx),%eax
shrl $24,%eax

Is it permissible to optimise this to (x86 is little-endian):

movzbl 3(%rbx),%eax?

(You could also optimise "movl; sarl" into a "movsbl" instruction this way)

Logically the result is the same and it removes an instruction and a 
pipeline stall, but will there be a performance hit that comes from 
reading an unaligned byte of memory like that?

I did make similar optimisation once before with QWords using the 
implicit zero-extension of the 32-bit MOV instruction - that is:

movq (%rbx),%rax
shrq $32,%rax

To:

movl 4(%rbx),%eax

This one is a little nicer though because it's still on a 32-bit 
boundary and so was permissible.

Gareth aka. Kit